Norma likes grapes. She is 89 and lives about 143 miles away from me. She has a deep commitment to Morrisons fish and chips, loves butter mints, and is always trying to slip her granddaughter a tenner. That’s what Norma is like. It feels as though we’ve grown close in recent weeks. But the truth is, I’ve never met her. I’m one of her 2 million followers on TikTok, checking in daily to see what she has been up to. She has been on a Stannah stairlift to fame ever since her granddaughter Jess started her TikTok account during the pandemic.
I’ve found nans online a source of comfort ever since my own died recently. My gran was about as far removed from social media as you can get. She died at the grand old age of 97, could barely see or hear, and was utterly fed up. But she was remarkable. She was a Holocaust survivor, studied for a PhD in zoology, and her mind could cut glass. In conversations she could jostle between Arthur Koestler and drop scones, and even tell you in detail how to dip a sheep. Her name was Erika Renate Przibram Wallis, and she died on Monday 18 December at 4.45am. I saw her just weeks before – regal, demure, but happy to go. “Be good,” were the last words she said to me. “But not too good.”
In the maw that’s left I’ve increasingly looked online to fill what is lost. A recent poll found that 66% of gen Z and millennials enjoy watching videos featuring older people; 78% say they learned a lot from them. Perhaps they are drawn to that authenticity. Social media is no longer solely the realm of fake tans, goody bags and free trips to Mykonos. Now it is also comfort that compels us.
It’s not just in Britain, either. “NanTok” – as it’s called – is a global phenomenon. Gangster Granny lives in Ohio and is a veritable pensioner A-lister, with 396m likes on TikTok. In Taiwan, octogenarian launderette owner Hsu Sho-Er and her husband, Chang Wan-Ji, showcased fashion “lewks” made from customers’ abandoned clothing on their Instagram account. When Hsu Sho-Er died in May last year, their 727,000 followers mourned. Such is the ingrained community of NanTok.
When Norma dies I’ll be distraught. Grief can be digital, too. The thread that runs through these accounts shows that the solace of granny is universal. They are our surrogates.
No one expects their gran to go viral. Jess certainly didn’t. “I used to post her on my private Snapchat story,” she tells me. “People would reply saying how funny she is and how she reminded them of good times with their own grandparents and I should post her on TikTok. I ended up posting a video of her reacting to my brother’s tattoos and it blew up, then I posted Nan offering me money for fish and chips, which also blew up. At first she wasn’t too sure about it, but now it’s one of the things she looks forward to most in her day.”
To age in Britain is often to be reduced. To be thought of as a lesser thing. And we ignore all the accumulated wisdom of their decades of life. In Europe, grans are the guard dogs of the family and they are pulled into its wide bosom. My gran resisted a care home until it was necessary, but her experience was a good one. She insisted on renaming the home’s cockapoo, and the dog even responded: Micky became Jimmy.
These ashen-haired influencers are the best of us. Norma reminds me how much we are all alike. She takes the piss out of Jess. She tells her she looks as if she has been dragged through a hedge. She makes me feel at home. It’s less transactional than much of social media. No one is trying to sell me a lifestyle. It’s just someone’s gran going about their day to day life.
Jolyon Varley, the founder of OK Cool, a creative agency that specialises in social media, tells me these nans connect with people partly from the strong sense of self that comes from decades of experience and self-knowledge. “It’s also reassuring that they’ve never lost their cool – and perhaps we may not either,” he says.
“I’m just overwhelmed by the number of people who speak to us from all over the world,” says Norma. “And the beautiful messages we get. Me and Jess were always close, but the videos give us a totally new way to connect with each other.”
In May 2023 the Office for National Statistics found that 22% of 50- to 69-year-olds felt lonely “often, always, or some of the time”; 19% of people over 70 did, too. Perhaps social media actually provides an antidote to loneliness, rather than exacerbating it. The rise of the Insta-nan is a balm to both them and us. It gives them life, hope and support – and it gives us those things too.
Maybe it’s time to visit Granny. I wish I could still.
Max Wallis is a writer and poet
